Susan Bordo is an American philosopher known for her contributions in the field of contemporary cultural studies, particularly in the area of feminist theory. Bordo specializes in contemporary culture and its relation to the body, focusing on eating disorders which primarily affect females, such as anorexia and bulimia; cosmetic surgery; beauty; and evolutionary theory. She also explores racism and the body, masculinity, and sexual harassment.
Overview
Bordo's writing contributes to a body of feminist, cultural and gender studies, linking modern consumer culture directly to the formation of gendered bodies. Her work includes "Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body" (1993), a text that looks at the impact of popular culture (television, advertisements, and magazines, for example) in shaping the female body while also looking at typical female disorders such as hysteria, agoraphobia, anorexia nervosa and bulimia as "complex crystallizations of culture." Bordo has also garnered attention for her more recent book "The Male Body: A New Look at Men in Public and Private"(1999), a text which Bordo describes as being "a personal/cultural exploration of the male body from a woman's point of view." According to her University of Kentucky profile, the book has appeared in magazines such as Mademoiselle and Vanity Fair.
Education and Career
Susan Bordo was raised in Newark, New Jersey. Bordo received her high school diploma in 1964 from Weequahic High School. She received her Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1982. She currently holds the Otis A. Singletary Chair in the Humanities at the University of Kentucky, where she teaches English and Women's studies.
Theoretical context
Philosophical discourse
While Bordo's writing works to "reach outside the academic world," her prose and critiques of modern culture in relation to subject, gender, and body formations are nonetheless grounded in theoretical frameworks. Bordo's work reflects a background in philosophical discourse in which issues of rationality, objectivity, and Cartesian dualism are explored and used to situate the body within culture historically. Bordo claims that "[w]hat remains the constant element throughout historical variation is the construction of body as something apart from the true self (whether conceived as soul, mind, spirit, will, creativity, freedom . . .) and as undermining the best efforts of that self." She traces the "body" as a concept and as a material "thing" back to Plato, Augustine, and the Bible revealing how the body has been viewed as "animal, as appetite, as deceiver, as prisoner of the soul and confounder of its projects." She also traces the dualistic nature of the mind/body connection by examining the early philosophies of Aristotle, Hegel, and Descartes, revealing how distinguishing binaries such as spirit/matter and male activity/female passivity have worked to solidify gender characteristics and categorization. Bordo proceeds to point out that while men have historically been associated with the intellect and the mind or spirit, women have long been associated with the body, the subordinated, negatively imbued term in the mind/body dichotomy.